What is Subsea Target?

Subsea Target is an initiative for individuals seeking access into the subsea industry. There is a separate resource centre available for companies seeking to recruit talent into their business, here.

Subsea Target is a key resource aimed at tackling the skills shortages facing the subsea industry. Subsea Target aims to equip companies with the tools necessary to find talent with relevant, transferable skills, as well as assist individuals in their approach to these companies.

Subsea Target is a skills initiative run by the industry body, Subsea UK. Subsea UK, as the champion of the UK subsea industry, acts for the benefit of the entire supply chain, bringing together operators, contractors, suppliers and people in the industry. With some 50,000 employees, worth almost £6 billion in services and products and with over 800 companies, the UK subsea industry sector leads the world in experience, innovation and technology.

To maintain a vibrant subsea sector and allow it to maximise the opportunities presented by both the Oil and Gas and the renewables sectors, Subsea UK has strategies which address both the long term and the immediate people resourcing and development requirements of the sector. Subsea Target is a resource for individuals. If you are a business, please click here.

The Aim of Subsea Target

Subsea UK’s successful bid to the Energy Skills Challenge Fund of Skills Development Scotland (SDS) is providing an additional boost to Subsea UK’s ongoing efforts to support the subsea sector’s attraction and development of the people.

The primary but not exclusive focus of the first phase of this project is supporting the companies in the sector to bring in more people who require limited amounts of additional knowledge and skills, and get them to contribute to the businesses as quickly as possible. The project’s overarching objective is to make a real and sustainable difference to the issues companies are facing by offering practical help and support. For many companies the biggest challenge is building their own capacity and capability to take on, assimilate and equip new entrants.

Subsea Target

Is the wrap around brand that has been developed to describe the project’s two major work streams: one which focuses on individuals and provides current, relevant and practical guidance and information to those wanting to join the sector, the other targeted at supporting companies to develop their capacity and capability to bring in and absorb new staff;

The information is designed to:-

Dispel commonly held myths for example about the proportion of jobs offshore versus those onshore

Introduce the types of companies that operate in the sector,

Highlight the diversity of people in the sector and backgrounds they have come from

Show opportunities to those considering a career change for transferability of relevant skills.

Subsea Target – focusing on a range of individuals with transferable skills and potential:

by showcasing the range of subsea opportunities and the diversity of people who work in the sector and providing information and guidance to increase their chances of success in joining subsea companies. This will be delivered via the web subseatarget.com, which will provide information and practical guidance to a range of individuals to help remove the barriers to entering employment within the subsea sector.

Subsea Target – Supporting Companies:

to either expand existing in-house developmental programmes or for newer businesses helping to establish them. This approach allows learning and successful practice to be shared to prevent people “reinventing the wheel”. The tools and guidance being developed to help companies do this is based on working with companies that are currently facing resourcing and development challenges and implementing these conversion/transition programmes in their businesses. This work will accelerate and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of how companies manage to:

Fast track qualified professionals to cross over into the subsea sector

Bring in technicians and job changers from other sectors, including the military, which just need to top up their knowledge and skills and gain an understanding of the subsea context;

In house training and development programmes that recognize existing staff as well as allowing companies increase the numbers of entry-level recruits they can take on.

Additionally new models are being developed and tested for the way we work directly with specific target groups e.g. the forces. “Mobilising the Military” is a new much more targeted, bespoke smaller scale approach based on specific guidance and direct brokering rather than just providing information. This work stream is designed to increase the number of military personnel that companies recruit as a result of a) better understanding by applicants about how to describe their skills and experience to subsea employers b) better understanding by subsea recruiters of military personnel transferable skills.

Energy Skills Challenge Fund

The Skills Investment Plan for Energy, launched in 2011 by the First Minister, set out not just the scale of opportunity in the energy sector, but also a series of intervention areas to address the key skills challenges. Key to success is the ability to attract significant numbers of new people to the sector, with the focus being on those who require limited amounts of re-skilling, as this will be the most economically efficient. These people are likely to come through a range of routes including job changers and those impacted by redundancy.

Bids are invited by Skills Development Scotland “SDS” from specialist employer led organisations, who’s primary focus is delivering sectoral skills activities within the energy sector, to accelerate delivery and increase availability of transition training……

The Fund will deliver practical solutions to the critical skills challenges faced by the energy sector, focusing specifically on “transition training” enabling graduates and mature entrants with associated experience and generalist qualifications to become energy experts at an accelerated pace. The rapid growth in being experienced in the energy industries is causing significant skills shortages and this problem is set to become more acute as expansion of capacity continues. The sector represents a major opportunity for Scotland but if skills shortages are left unchecked there is a danger that these opportunities will not be maximized, or – more critically – they will be missed.

The aims of the Challenge Fund are to:

Attract and provide access to transition training and employment from a diverse pool of individuals

Allow employers to influence the quality and content of transition training and shape provision to meet their needs